John Egner's recent collages and wood relief sculptures are masterful inter-cuttings and re-workings of earlier pieces and processes.
John Egner was born and raised in Philadelphia. After one year at Franklin and Marshal College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he transferred to the Philadelphia Mu... Read more
John Egner’s recent collages and wood relief sculptures are masterful inter-cuttings and re-workings of earlier pieces and processes.
John Egner was born and raised in Philadelphia. After one year at Franklin and Marshal College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he transferred to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, where he received a B.F.A. in painting in 1963. After a brief period studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he went to Yale School of Art and Architecture where he received his M.F.A. in 1966.
John started teaching painting at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1966 and continued there until 1987. It was during those years that a significant art community flourished in the “Cass Corridor” area where John lived just south of Wayne’s campus, he was one of the pivotal figures in that movement. In 1979 while on Sabbatical, John rented a studio on Franklin Street, in lower Manhattan. After the 15 month sabbatical was over he held on to that studio and “commuted” between New York and Detroit until he resigned from Wayne to pursue his studio practice full time.
His work is in a number of museum collections, most notably The Detroit Institute of Arts and The Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York. He has had numerous one-man exhibitions in the Detroit area, New York, and Los Angeles and been in countless group shows around the country. John has received grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts and has produced a number of large scale public commissions. After leaving Wayne, he had one semester visiting artist appointments at Harvard University, The Maryland Art Institute, New York University, and Parsons School of Design.
